Charlie's Good Tonight: The Authorised Biography of The Rolling Stones’ Charlie Watts

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However, the ever-practical Watts quietly weaned himself off drugs even before his problem had become public knowledge, and concentrated on building a family life focused around horses and breeding sheepdogs at a country estate he had purchased in Devon. Despite becoming one of the greats of rock’n’roll, the dapper and deadpan Charlie Watts, who has died aged 80, spent more than 60 years doing his second-favourite job. The first edition in the iconic dust-jacket of one of the most influential detective novels of all time. On Get Off Of My Cloud, he plays exactly the same fill every two bars throughout the song’s verses: there’s something relentless about it, which fits perfectly given Get Off Of My Cloud is about frustrated anger.

Charlie’s Good Tonight: The Life, the Times, and the Rolling Charlie’s Good Tonight: The Life, the Times, and the Rolling

He grew up in a prefab in a drab north London suburb, and jazz, his first love, became a passport to a world of crisply dressed cool and dazzling artistry, his heroes alto saxophonist Charlie Parker – jazz’s Picasso – and drummer Chico Hamilton. It was one of the things he had in common with Keith – which people tend not to associate with Keith. From his vantage point at the back of the stage, Watts remained detached from the more colourful aspects of the band’s remarkable trajectory. Friday’s sales were dwarfed by the previous day’s bids, on which the gavel could be heard knocking on in-demand copies of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles and F Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel The Great Gatsby.It wasn’t just Charlie, I did it for Mick – sometimes he’s out there trying to work the crowd and he would look at me and I could say “verse” or “chorus”. The book is inscribed three times: once saying it is his copy, “once when he’s presenting it to his first serious girlfriend, and he crosses that out and then he presents it another time to a next girlfriend”, explains Wiltshire.

Charlie Watts’s prized book and music Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts’s prized book and music

I think he started with the authors, fell in love with the text and in the way so many of us do when we have a particular author that we love, he wanted to get as close as he could to their lives and the interaction they’d had with that copy of a book. He collected the finest possible condition, the rarest editions, the most interesting presentation copies. Pausing at a display of plates and dishes of the Huguenot silversmith Paul de Lamerie – valued at some 3.

For all the absurdity of a man yearning to be performing in a jazz club playing to a combined total on the two legs of the tour of 5. First edition, first printing, inscribed by the author: “For Harold Goldman / The original “Gatsby” of this story, with thanks for letting me reveal these secrets of his past. Watts studied graphic design at Harrow Art School before he joined the Stones, and so knew how the elements of a printed page — the running heads, the font, the folios — speak with the accent of the decade in which they were made. Hundreds of rare books owned by the Rolling Stones drummer and bibliophile Charlie Watts will be put up for sale this autumn, representing the “best collection of modern first editions” to come to auction in over 20 years.

Charlie Watts, drummer for the Rolling Stones, dies at 80 | CNN Charlie Watts, drummer for the Rolling Stones, dies at 80 | CNN

Jazz memorabilia, such as an annotated printed score for George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, will be on sale alongside the books.The Stones’ investiture of long-standing friend and collaborator Steve Jordan as Charlie’s locum and then successor brought admirable continuity, but also an inevitable change in the stage dynamics. The Jazz Age in the US coincided with the golden years of detective fiction in Britain, and Watts’s collection is rich in English crime novels from the 1920s and 1930s.

Charlie Watts: the calm, brilliant eye of the Rolling Stones Charlie Watts: the calm, brilliant eye of the Rolling Stones

He was given his first drum kit as a Christmas present in 1955, and while other kids were shaking a leg to Bill Haley or Elvis Presley, he dreamed of playing drums with Davis, or stepping into Art Blakey’s shoes with the Jazz Messengers. That advice surely applies double when the act under consideration is the Rolling Stones, a group who have left in their wake a trail of outrage, depravity, misogyny, addiction and a few real-life cadavers.One famous story from the early 70s involved the band being invited to party at the Playboy Mansion: Watts slipped away and sequestered himself in the games room for the entire night. Watts, who died in 2021, amassed the works of mostly 20th-century authors including James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Graham Greene, George Orwell and Ernest Hemingway. Their first gig was in the legendary London jazz club Ronnie Scott’s, where Watts was a frequent, if undercover, visitor.